Spoiler Alert, seriously. You should make the effort to read Ubik if you haven’t already, and then come back and skim this, the usual stuff. It’s actually a pretty quick read, and this is coming from somebody who rarely meanders onto the printed page. It must have taken me three months to read Childhood’s End, but Ubik was only a matter of three days.

Ubik is the most maddening, perplexing, fascinating, and mind-blowing novel I’ve yet to read. It feels, essentially, like a funny PKD short story like “We Can Remember it for You Wholesale,” but blown up to 200 pages. That’s not a bad thing, but it does present one crucial problem. There’s a punchline to the novel, and it feels like a giant joke, in some way, that Philip K. Dick is dictating to us with his usual wit and entertaining prose. That’s fine, except that I didn’t feel nearly as much sympathy for the hero of the aforementioned short story as I did with Joe Chip or Glen Runciter – or even Pat Conley, who’s involvement in the narrative took me the most. When the characters are victims of some massive farce by the end of a phildickian short story, it’s the story itself that sticks with us; the characters are just vessels by which the story’s punchline gets through. In the longform medium, the paradigm shifts, and the length and complexity of the journey undertaken by the characters engages us on a higher level with those characters.

And yet, Ubik ends with the short story kick, which, by the time I reached the About the Author section and gazed upon it with wild eyes, caused me to emit a sound not unlike a groan, but more like a yelp. I was shocked, but this feeling was both amplified and frustrated by emotions gathered in the immediately preceeding chapter: disgust, mostly. When Jory was revealed I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough to reveal how hero Joe Chip would resolve this larger-than-life conflict in the last twenty or so pages, meanwhile ticking away in my mind about how the scenario depicted is like The Matrix (or Inception, if you’d rather) but so much more fucked up, unbelievably so.

In the novel’s final moments, I was constantly reminded of how close to death Joe Chip was, how horrible this death would be, how irreversibly screwed he was, and how no matter what satirical 1992 future he lived in where life and death operate on a strange new level – he could never escape it. My mind was churning with these dark, intense thoughts, and after I put the book down one last time I experienced something very rare.

Usually in science-fiction I really fall in love with, I find myself thinking about the themes and ideas explored long after the title has expired, and usually I relate them here on this website. After Ubik, I was literally thoughtless. My mind was actually blown, taken up to a height unprecedented by an author with golden wings and dropped at the turn of the final page onto hard pavement. The disturbing nature of half-life and of Jory shook me, carrying me with jolting unease through the rest of the novel, where my mental discomfort paralleled hero Joe Chip’s frantic and shattering struggle to regain control of his body – inside his mind.

Based on what Wikipedia has to offer, and the scrawling I’ve found on the inside covers as penned by the book’s previous owner, the eponymous Ubik has been interpreted as God, something that heals us and is everywhere. The argument is that Ubik restores our faith in ourselves, makes Joe Chip believe that he can win the unwinnable fight against Jory. But in the end, he cannot. Eventually things run out – everything ends, and in the Ubik universe, things seem to end with Jory. So is Dick in this way criticizing God and our faith in him? The ending makes me think so, which essentially says that we can’t be sure of anything, not even God or his healing powers, but death is a constant for everyone, no matter how far we get into the future.

I don’t know. Philip K. Dick would go on to write more blatantly theological novels, yet Ubik isn’t considered one of them. It is however, very phildickian, and one clear tell is the inclusion of the dark-haired girl. This time it’s a character named Pat Conley, who indeed is malevolent and a force of destruction. For me, she’s also a force of more discomfort – I really didn’t take to the idea that she was eaten by Jory, that just didn’t sit well with me. Otherwise she was an interesting character among a cast of interesting characters, and I can’t help but wonder how Philip K. Dick manages to balance so many well-rounded elements in one novel, considering how fast he put these and the short stories out.

There’s a lot to be said about Ubik, but I don’t have the capacity to say it. I’ll leave this one up to you, dear reader, because I think what we have here is something of a personal journey to be undertaken, and I can only point you in the Dickiest direction.

In terms of Dick, I think I’ll skip The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch for now and go right to Martian Time-Slip, per your recommendation, although I did just buy The Lathe of Heaven, and figured that should be my next stop

Apparently the book will be adapted soon by Michel Gondry. I’m not sure how to feel about that. I loved Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but it’s the only film of his that I’ve seen. I’ve been told that The Science of Sleep is very similar to Eternal Sunshine but much less successful. Be Kind Rewind looks like a typical Jack Black comedy (i.e. something I very likely would not enjoy) and The Green Hornet got miserable reviews. I guess I can remain optimistic, but goddamnit, when will Cronenberg get to adapt Dick?

Also, I wonder if the movie will be able to avoid being labeled a rip-off of Vanilla Sky or Inception, both of which share very similar stories. The huge inspiration that Dick has on filmmakers today is just going to be more and more of a problem for future adaptations. You wouldn’t be able to adapt, for example, Time Out of Joint without every critic in the world pointing out that the story is essentially The Truman Show.

I heard somewhere that Abre Los Ojos was a spiritual adaptation of Ubik, but I haven’t seen that nor the Tom Cruise American remake. Michel Gondry sounds promising, as Eternal Sunshine was really good. Be Kind Rewind was a fun time, but then again I’m not totally down on Jack Black like many are (perhaps rightfully so).

I doubt if we’ll ever see a Cronenberg Dick movie. He was for a year attached to Total Recall, but got booted off by DeLaurentis. Can you imagine what he was thinking when he saw that movie?

If anybody says the Ubik movie feels like a rip off of Inception I’m sure they’ll be laughed off the Internet. I hope

Inception has some similarities to Ubik (corporate espionage, shared dream worlds, the basic theme of not knowing what’s real) but the plot of Abre Los Ojos and Vanilla Sky is pretty much a straight rip-off. There’s a traumatic event that the main character survives, then he starts to experience strange and horrible things, then someone appears to him to let him know that he didn’t actually survive the traumatic event and that his dead body is frozen and hooked up to… well, you’ve read the book, so you know what happens.

Surprisingly, though, Abre Los Ojos manages to feel like it has its own identity, despite being such a blatant rip-off. It’s a very good movie, but Vanilla Sky is fucking awful. It’s incredibly pretentious and feels like a vanity project from start to finish, and it does nothing to improve upon or even match Abre Los Ojos. If you liked Ubik, I highly recommend the Spanish film. Don’t bother with the remake. It’s not Minority Report or even Paycheck for that matter.

There’s a quote from Cronenberg on Wikipedia’s Total Recall page where he says that he stayed faithful to Dick when he was working on his drafts of the screenplay, but everyone else wanted to do what they called “Raiders of the Lost Ark Go to Mars.” For the record, I found Total Recall to be very enjoyable, and I think it stays faithful to Dick on a basic thematic level, but I’ll always lament the unmade Cronenberg version.

Total Recall is scifi Commando – totally fun and stupid. Nothing wrong with that, especially when considering the prospect of adapting something like that short story. I mean it’s great, but not very cinematic.

A lot of people liked it, but it just made me want to punch Cameron Crowe in the throat. Paycheck is more of an incompetent trashy action movie, but Vanilla Sky has its head shoved so far up its own ass that I’m surprised it didn’t implode and create a black hole, destroying the Earth over a decade ago. It’s like Waking Life, just as pretentious but with a bigger budget, Tom Cruise, and a worse soundtrack.